When I was a kid I always admired the myth of the federal drug administration. The FDA would not allow a single headache pill to hit the market until it was tested on mice, prisoners, and cats in controlled experiments lasting for years in their clear immense laboratories. only after all the data was sifted by their impeccable and cautious scientists would they allow the headache pill to be bought by an American citizen.

I have since realized that the FDA is one more political agency filled with mediocrities, run by special interests, some of whom prefer cigarettes and liquor to marijuana, but the idea that the governments would not legitimize any policy unless it knew its consequences stayed with me as an ideal of sane politics.

I have lived through a time when the United States has jettisoned a system that educated its children in a no-frills generic way for one that does not work at all. I have wondered whether this was an accident or a plot. I have tended to think sometimes it fits the agendas of mediocrities who rule.

If history shows that slave states with populations of passive or dissident populace fall before the economic or military attacks of the first free republic that can garner all the energies of its citizens into activity, we have the crushing evidence merely because most governors rarely learn from the Past..

At other times I think our educational system is a tragic harvest of short term responses to past situations few can barely remember. It must have seemed self-evident to people straightjacketed by a life of hard work and endurance of much pain that a superior existence could be garnered from giving up terror as a mode of learning and a model for politics. One can remember the echo of Dewey, Neill, and Russell in the dream of the freedom and fecundity of a life rooted in creativity and positive motivation.

Can one blame the therapists for lobbying to eliminate stress that made their patients miserable and crazy? By ridding the family of that advocate of hard work- the father- and promoting by non-elective means a world without guilt, superego or primal bonding, therapists and feminists honestly believed they were providing all with a boon. When they walk through the South Bronx or any inner city where their ideas were law they may even wonder what could have gone wrong.

If Scenario number one is that rulers act to destroy the autonomy of the populace, Scenario number two is that America has changed since 1920 and Woman's Suffrage and the end of survival culture to another social reality. Gore Vidal has spoken of the three Americas. The first was based on the Constitution. The second was a Darwinian empire in which survival of the fittest in which male strength was legitimized as the central and sole virtue in political, social and individual relations between people.

The third America is the feminized tender-loving-care empire of television, Welfare, and Therapy, overpaid suburban insect centers of obesity and huge urban concentration camps for the poor, Feminists and therapists replacing the old Catholic Church as the Established Church and censor, and all the other marvels of progress we all know.

In either scenario the plans have failed. No one can rule a nation of furious, disenfranchised neurotics who cannot work, will not fight for the nation, and make life in their locale impossible for those who have escaped the descent into violence. Inevitably something bad must happen to the elite personally. They must live in privately policed enclaves like the current rulers of Peru, and dare not go anywhere. They are as much in jail as the poor.

Since they watch the same television programs, they may often be living exactly like the poor. They have no way, no matter how many guards they have, to sequester themselves from the feminized Welfare world. They are inundated by agitprop of that populist realm through the media. They dare not go out into the world but the world goes freely into their castle keeps. They may educate their children in private schools but they themselves or people they care about will be mugged, have messy stupid divorces, be afraid to walk the streets, will be surrounded by infinite legions of artificial morons. This cannot be their agenda.

The special interests of the second scenario cannot be happy with the results of our educational experiment either. Every time somebody flees a city the lobbyists lose one of the faithful. Their realms have turned into an etude in penology. They are haunted personally by the generations of institutionalized artificial men and women they have created. One of the Very Rich said to me two decades ago: "We can put these people into camps run by the army."

The poor and middle classes are already in Dachaus; only the jailers are different. Not that poor and middle classes are words that describe any of these people. Those called the poor in America live better than kings several centuries ago. The middle classes do not work; they shuffle papers. The language has not caught up to their reality. The poor get tender loving care from the Feminists and therapists and Socialist, the middle classes get contractual slavery from the corporate world.

I am guessing; I reckon both scenarios are true. Where did they make an error? Back in the late 40s American society was really a set of discrete worlds in which were like a thousand autonomous laboratories. One could see the results of certain actions in closed systems. Most of the feminized institutional experiments were laid on the lives of poor Blacks, White trash and poor Hispanics, all sequestered nicely in their enclaves. In 1945 they all seemed to the Very Rich Darwinists like convicts, having little to lose by being rats in a maze.

The makers of these scenarios never thought they lived in an openended system, not a closed cage of rats, and American society would attain a homogeneity through unguessed at variables like the media that would spread what was done to a discrete group everywhere. The rats escaped and are now a good part of the world population.

My great grandparents and yours left an old world because they felt they could not upgrade life there. They were right. Flight and exile is proper and even mandatory when one's world is powerful enough to plunge toward suicide and none of its citizens can stop it. America has been settled in the past 300 years by people who have made the same assessment.

Many from the Puritans who fled Egypt across a desert of death and rebirth to found a new Egypt from which it is more difficult to flee. One has to take some responsibility for the Zion one has created by taming the wilderness and clearing away the hapless local inhabitants. One cannot blame one's slavery and decline on the local Egyptians.

I have worked in the schools for nearly twenty years and have never seen the quality of hopelessness either in students or teachers that I do today. Public school teachers warn their brethren in the high schools that the children of crackheads are coming. Wait, they say, you have seen nothing yet. Young teachers quit, the others go quietly crazy or vegetative. The parents move to try to find good schools and discover no matter where they go, there are only degrees of ineptitude.

There is a certain selfishness in the complacency or despair most Americans feel about their current educational system. They are accustomed these days to assume our children will be stupider and less educated than we are. Fathers like myself are constant tutors, continual cowboys wheeling and dealing through the bankrupt system, looking to salvage what we can from the zombie-world of schools.

My son already knows that the textbooks make simple grammatical errors, use inexact words, tell lies. I did not have to grow up learning from such inept tools. He is not all that motivated because nobody in the schools shows him the beauty and elegance of mathematics, or the great thoughts that one can discover in books. Nobody but me preaches the power that comes from knowledge.

A generation whose waking hours are spent watching the tube have neither the models nor the evidence from which to become intelligent. It is not television that makes them into potatoes. The Japanese culture has survived television; it has thrived on it. Television is neutral. It is neither hot nor cool. Marshall MacLuhan never watched anything but American and Canadian television. Two of the best communications devices in the world are public access television, the technology of portable cameras, and eccentric radio stations.

Good media does not have to be propped up by grants and patronage. I remember in the early 50s a local commercial series of programs sponsored by cheese, car electronics and light bulb companies that offered a very high run of Art and culture. When I was in France it was common to watch four intellectuals being witty on prime time for an hour.

We cannot blame the tube for our educational descent into potato life. American television is what it is because it responds to a demand of its audience to trivialize everything. It is not a discrete request. Go to the rebels in our society, and you will found beyond the neo-medieval Fundamentalists the same passion to rob all things of their emotive power. It is the ultimate aim of the Therapists and Feminists who lobby for their ends in the educational arenas. Primal bonding, terror, biological sex roles deserve to be critiqued. But lack of these causes creates another prison: a world of strangers and indifference.

This anti-humanism can lead to the Iraqi War theater or Charles Manson. When Americans do not like their family or community, they move with the same ease they trade in an old car. When they tire of pleasure they treat like a new cuisine, they go to the next restaurant. Knowing that tomorrow one may not have any support system, one flattens one's emotions to prepare for embracing such volatility. One tries to be the one with enough power to set the time and details of the demise of the world around one. When all is trivial, that is as much freedom as one can have.

The corporations move their people around every few years to suit their interests; middle class people have learnt never to become too attached to any place or community. Welfare people are controlled by the state from birth to death,. An extended family thousands of miles away in all directions is not a survival unit. One embraces family members for sentimental reasons if at all. Communities in America never have the chance to become singular because they are never inhabited for long by the same people.

The very land one lives one becomes a motel. If no one near or far is other than a stranger, The inhabitants sense that something is askew and do not love the government or corporate world that design their lives. Their are without power, and content themselves with minor theft and vegetation as a metaphor for bondage. One could repair to Nature and live in the woods like Daniel Boone, but one would be poisoned by the fish in the rivers and lakes and their cancer-producing PCBs if one could find the wilderness in the real estate developments. We are talking about the citizens of an Empire who live in it, not its Daniel Boones.

The educational system is thus not a discrete failure but a cog in an empire which has many of the qualities of a modified slave state. With such general emotion motivational equipment it is no wonder young students in our schools are not focused on excellence in their school work. their teachers, schools, parents, and community will all go away soon enough. One has to endure them, and not for long. Teachers know they are treated like television programs. Teacher burn-out is a disease that hits most good teachers about the sevenths or eighth year of their ministry even in a good school. A child meets a teacher at some stage of this terminal diseases if they are any good at all. On the battlefield where minds are either engaged in knowledge and excellence or condemned to artificial stupidity, teachers are crippled by the various agendas they are required to push at their students. The kids know they are nonsense. My son knows that Puerto Rico is not a cultural center of his civilization. He may not know why, but he guesses that people of African descent have not been as important in American society as those of, let us say, German descent.

He never reads a book talking of the German contribution to his nation. Lamentable as it may seem to the totalitarian masters of perceptual reality taught in his school that the wrong cultures have been central to the West, my son deserves truth, not psychotic denial. Religious wars have been fought in the schools for as long as I can remember. All the major tribes and cults have their holiday, and it is not enough that one learns to be a good person; one has to swear allegiance to God and the harvests American enjoys from the geniuses among us from the Dominican Republic.

My son reads books about integrated neighborhoods that do not exist, worlds in which there are no poor, nobody works hard, there are no involutions, imperfections. Various groups who have not had great economic success are praised presumptively for their existence. I don't mind so much that learns daily the central role Puerto Rico and Africa has played in western civilization; I learned similar if different nonsense and recovered. In spite of the teachers, was taught what he is learning: schools lie. All states are an eternal Egypt.

The schools are not destructive because they lie; truth and honesty are not valuable commodities anywhere. The underlying message in multi-racist teaching is the same as in Nazi lore. One can take a lifelong tepid bath in a culture made by others. Whether one is a member of the Klu Klux Klan or Farrakhan's group, one can feel that the efforts of others, most of whom are dead, is enough

In fact the dominant Western culture was founded by a whole set of relatively tolerant mercantile republics and Mediterranean lightfooted itinerants who needed personal freedom, skepticism and analysis of a diverse Nature to protect them against empires, radicals, fundamentalists, and military evangels.

Our Constitution is supposed to protect us against these immortal enemies but there should be some nice place in a museum where the Bill of Rights is placed next to the first airplane. American ideas has nearly always had a radical character. there are few true conservatives in the united States, and those that are keep very quiet.

When I was in the school system most ideas I was taught were credos of White Western supremacy. They were justifications for imperialism, missionaries, assimilation to a wonder bread culture, and racism.

My son lives in a world in which there are few people who have a good word for the state and its institutions. I am not one of them. I do not have to say a word against the social world he lives in. He sees its lies more quickly than I do. He points out to me the anti-male bias of institutional ads in the subways.

"They hate us because we're stronger than they are," he says to me. I am astonished. He does not hear that from me. He is accustomed to ungrammatical school books which tell him lies. He shrugs. What else does he know? The agitprop has the same radical character as my own education though it is soporifically at a pole from it. He also must know, I think, that I cannot do anything about correcting any of the faults in his world. In a decade he will begin his go at transforming a reality I was powerless to change.

There is nothing about this programmed world he likes much. He sees most men feel helpless in it. The law is not for them; it is for others. As a man in a society where most marriages turn out to be pretexts to take constitutional rights way from fathers, I am lucky to survive in it. He doesn't know about the laws. He doesn't have to; he lives under their consequences.

He does know that most kids do not have their daddies around. He'll find out the reason later and do something about it or live elsewhere. When his ancestors could not change the Old World, they left it.

He has no memory of the tremendously powerful and legitimate specific interests that destroyed families and communities while claiming to be perpetual victims. He only knows it is ordinary for mommies and daddies to not get along and live separate lives. All his relatives are elsewhere.

His world is an urban jungle filled with indifferent strangers. He has the slenderest of support systems. I take him by subway to and from a school traveling over an hour twice a day to escape local schools, and I think secretly we would have done better in the neighborhood. No institution works in the cities. He dare not play in the streets alone. He is born into a subtle prison.

One can analyze the agendas that my son has to contend with to keep his sanity. Underneath the diverse specific interests one finds two central experimental realities taught in America in and out of the educational system: triviality and feminization. I have already dealt with triviality. The main argument for it is that it is an effective check against tribalism, fundamentalism, romantic dolors, national wars, revolutions and individualism. It is thus an inevitable preference in educational strategy for rulers of large empires.

Triviality perpetuates their rule in the short run. In the long run it undermines the capacity of a populace to work hard at anything or to value excellence. The state becomes prey to the first nation that hold the old male aggressive but humanist values.

Feminization in America is a natural consequence of an over-masculine dominance of the state by survivalists that held legal power until 1920. Women could not own property, vote, and culturally were deemed inferior, happiest when slaves to a man. seventy years alter the legal, educational, and provincial intellectual world in America were dominated by female nationalism. By 1990 some forty million American men were disenfranchised by divorce of constitutional rights as women had been before 1920.

Men were commonly portrayed by the Feminists as rapists, child abusers and brutes. Therapy as a cult with fake scientific credentials echoed this feminization. A product of the German left that brought in Hitler after dominating the Weimar republic for fifteen years, Therapy is a moral discipline freeing the self from early childhood bonding that sometimes calls itself a science. Its end is to replace strong emotions with roots in infancy by adult negotiation.

It sees everyone in its maw either as victims or complicitous in allowing themselves to be willing prey. Energies in people of this cult focus on the self. If one does not like where one is and whom one is with, one can move on. Every school in America has a resident Psychologist with this of social world view. It regards institutional experts pretending to be parents as preferable to biological ties like the family.

Therapy's tender lover care has produced a generation of self-involved solipsists whom no one sane would buy a used car from, much less marry. But the issue is not the agendas of the Feminists and Therapists but the replacement of family and community by the state. If nothing is more inefficient, unworkable and inelegant than people in therapy trying to negotiate out of pique and bile instead of looking for bonding and charity, they have already embraced an institutional loyalty that makes any reward coming from family impossible for them to garner.

If few responses are more chilling than those of a Feminist confronted with the miseries of people other than women, they are no different in charity and toleration than the rightwing racist institutional radicals that preceded their own cult. If bonding among Feminists oozes away from the aegis of a male love to women in general or specifically, if in therapy bonding flows from a mate to the therapist, the specifics of loss to family and community are less important than the loss itself.
I try to train my son in skills that the state attempts to undermine. I view the school system myself as an enemy he has to endure. I know its institutionalized Feminism and Therapy look on the male armor that produced high pain thresholds and stamina for excellent work as a disorder. They encourage all to be free of this damnable yoke.

The whole Welfare system, whom I worked for before I taught in the schools, was always a maternal figure with its tender loving care credo and unconditional love of its clients. Nothing was asked of them but their existence. One could not demand more from a mother.

None of these groups take any credit or responsibility for the mass of uneducated and undisciplined people churned out by the schools. Their complaint is that they never had enough money and support to do things the way they had wanted to.

It is the typical cry of the heart of any radical movement. Nature has defeated them only because they never were strong enough. I have heard these evangels claim they never had enough power to make a revolution, and achieved only an equivocal and fragile reform, vulnerable to reaction from those who did not know what was good for them.

Nobody voted to legitimize Therapists or Feminists and every four years in the late 20th people in what are obviously purely ceremonial etudes people have voted overwhelmingly against them. Nothing changes. Nobody should be surprised. America has had a long history of trying to force people to live and think all kinds of ways under the tyranny of law.

In each case broad disobedience forced the government to back away from its suicidal legislation. Slavery, Prohibition, lack of women's legal rights, anti-labor laws, anti-gay laws, Separate But Equal laws, anti-Asian laws, the poll tax, are the more dramatic examples of bad law forced upon Americans by fanatics. The laws were withdrawn with apologies or silence.

When I came up in the school system I was taught a racist imperialist version of History which was hardly to the interests of the city I lived in or the people who taught it. The base of it was that anybody who tried to exterminate or assimilate millions of people into slavery and make the world into wonder bread was a good guy. Alexander The Great, Charlemagne, Augustus, Cecil Rhodes, Cortez, Columbus and the United Nations were all good guys. Hitler was a bad guy because he tried to do to us what we were doing to everybody else.

Now I read history differently. For a few years a man can drink and not become a lush, smoke and not get lung cancer, play on an undefeated football team, or have a volatile love affair that does not break into nasty pieces. In the short term a state can do anything and does. Genocide, evangelical-assimilative juggernauts, colonialism, racism, Orwellian fantasy. any sort of injury to anybody.

In the long run the state grows tired and set up political events like the 60s, Vietnam, equality for Gays, Blacks and Women. In our current era statism inspires the global rise of Fundamentalism radical idea bouncing off another radical idea. One can for a short time educate American kids to be stupid, passive, ignorant slaves. Enough kids will escape out of desperation or sense to be strangers or enemies where the state needed friends.

If the state succeeds America will become irrelevant in power as Portugal or Zaire. We will not be able to make the technology that supports our military. If Portugal or Zaire decide they are tired to being irrelevant, they will run us. The modern technological state can happen anywhere, and develop quickly. It took Europe 400 years to move from a poor civil-war ridden anarchy of superstition to the dominant force in the New World Order. You could not mount much of an argument for the superiority of the White race in 1400 or the male-dominated West or Christianity.

In the 1990s we have seen Asian countries keep the technology, throw out the garbage, outdo the old West in all ways of life. At present the educational system is preparing my son for a life in a nation that may take its place with Italy and Constantinople as a museum.

Generally most Americans think of our school system as an institution in decline. Whether it was any good for us in the first place is a thought too terrifying to take up for most of us.

I donít think it was ever any good. At least before 1970 one could be competent enough at knowledge to make a living from what one learned in it. My grandparents and great grandparents in America earned a viable income from trades they mostly were trained in by their family. Tailors turned out other tailor, cobblers schooled their children to be cobblers. People needed both unless they wanted to go shoeless and naked. Whether they needed any of the jobs our schools in my day trained students for is another matter. My great grandparents were free and powerful if poor because they had skills that they could bring anywhere that readied the need of others for real necessities.

On the other hand itís hard to think of people more superfluous than the graduates of our colleges. Mostly they were drafted into an army of didacts and minor materialist priests who did what nobody needed but dupes and loons or trained other people like themselves to be fake provincial Europeans performing minor magic in these urban satraps.

The notion that there might be virtue and not corruption in a professional cadre of itinerant social engineers of one kind or another that could oversee, monitor and even control the flow of life is not an American idea. Itís a Marxian notion derived in turn from Enlightenment theories of philosophes in the European 18th century. It has never worked anywhere; the common people donít want such colorless and dull monks. It certainly was a rampant if pious catastrophe in its American version: Welfare, Therapy, the Jesuitic System, and the school system which fed the agencies cadres to work in these expanding niches.

The monarchial task of these jobs was to persuade the world that it needed them. Often it claimed to be the champions of those who were traditional designated prey for a long, long time: kids, the poor, women without men, marginal ethnics.

To paraphrase Voltaire, if such agencies didnít have such designated victims to prey upon they would have had to invent them. America was founded by people who had a contempt for USCG types; it should have always had an educational system based on self-reliance.

At a very deep level our schools even in their heyday trained their cohorts to be quislings to freedom, betrayers of their own candidacy to have adult power.

As a result our schools have always been one more theatre of desperation and illusion among many such unkosher enterprises among us. The ubiquity of them can be fatiguing. Where does one begin to understand oneself in a country that seems to be bent on misdirecting oneís attention to various mendacious definitions of both who and where one might be? I would hate to tell the reader the sad details of my own formal education in these matters. Nobody ever in my entire schooling ever brought up freedom and its disciplines, the singularity of the United States, the intents and reasons beyond the Constitution, analyzed American history as a very singular national wrestling with self-rule and freedom with no model.

I was in fact told by my teachers, all of whom were the son children of people who had fled Europe that democracy was the rule by the mob, Europe was a citadel of culture and America a hash hinterland of barefoot louts, that the history of intelligent life ended with the advent of the First World War and the demise of the life of true nobility, that even middle class oligarchs were covert mountebanks compared to the half gods that ran Europe in its heyday, and so on. One was regaled with the marvels of the sagacities of supposedly wise Christian monks. They just stopped short of praising Cortez and Pizarro.

One might wonder how this remarkable notion of European history and life much less why America schools ran this at their witlings ever happened. At various times Jefferson, Madison, Emerson, Thoreau and Henry Adams pondered upon what sort of schooling might be proper to a republic of free souls; their musings never got much past their private rambling. In fact Emerson was banished back in the late 1830s from Harvard when he suggested Americans schools should run their education based on observation, not received ideas.

If anyone in Emersonís time to the present dares to asserted that Europe has nothing to teach us unless we are vintners, that they are in fact learning from us how to honor their populace when they couldnít figure it out themselves, that their religions and national culture have a noxious history of wars and stifling regimes in peace, they are drummed out of the colleges as uncouth gadflies, deemed in their exile a loutish gaggle of cranks.

Yet in the real world that is precisely what has happened. Europe has either by peaceful or revolutionary means dumped its lords and priests as leaders. They are in fact better at moderate socialism that guarantees the populace a secure franchise on a dry day than we are. They have nationalized medicine for the sick, an easy dole for the weak and indigent and treat their old cults are rather amusing ceremonial affairs in huge buildings with wonderful music.

Their hierophants are sartorial and elegant, not savants. The only place in which pundits commonly advance the notion that Europe is a trove of civilization we could all be enriched by is American colleges. Europe itself doesnít believe it.

The history of the American schools is of course a long term disaster; for the purposes of this essay, it all doesnít mater. All we have to know is that one couldnít ever get at any time a tolerable addiction in our schools, even to who we were much less the ability to think independently; at the same time these masters of life took over by stealth the machines of our government to he point where even as one fled from them they demanded by law that those that have escaped them with their brains intact submit to certification by the vary corrupt pedants who had tried to make them ignorant, brainless, slothful, slavish or insane.

Usually if one shows intelligence or these days even if OEM doesnít one is funneled off as a child to these American schools sported by our taxes yet hardly representing us, to some spa with buildings looking like Oxford where one is taught to see Europe as a home for all of us and ourselves as provincial colonists of that sacred land.

Then these pundits are filled with all the ideas of Europe that made it the worldwide odium and looting machine it has been. Usually the great Artists and thinkers of Europe is associated by our pedants with its culture as if those creative spirits werenít mostly republicans or in some way for limited governments, against colonialism as Americans mostly are or at least have been for a long time, remembering when they were hapless colonials themselves.

Then one gets from these schools either the perpetual slave class that cannot compete with anybody at the bottom or European paid quislings at the top. Nothing about this remarkable yet ordinary feature of our national life is likely to change in the near future.

The message from this juggernaut is that self-definition and freedom is impossible, the limits of human action are narrow for good reason, we are all better off living under tyrants who at least allow up to vie for comfort, that the difference between one realm and another is how much money one can garner, how much we can lard our slavery and definition of ourselves eternally by others so we never become adults, with tolerably expensive amusement.

If we are ever going to discover what the United States is and who we are in it, it isnít going to come from a formal education. We might hap upon it accidentally in our free libraries though by now most of the books are stolen. Itís most likely going to come if at all from our more marginal citizens who out of neglect and disdain are living totally outside the spider nets that trap our more intelligent citizens in a glossy slaughterhouse for bloodless human arachnids.

As I think back on it I have to chide myself for my own lack of ability to confront what had happened to me as an American in our school system at a time when most of us would claim it worked. It produced a tyro competence; whether it aimed ever to do more I doubt. I never in my life took a single course in American culture; I couldnít have been living in New Zealand.

The ideas my teachers wafted in my direction as sacred axioms were so absurd to me I dismissed them at about twenty as a heap of nonsense; I can't say my very indulgent peers in an excellent school, the University Of Michigan, and it is Honors Program at that, never saw with my own clarity that we were all being duped like pigs led to slaughter. I was in fact come from the last year of such 50s soldiers ready to be middle managers of inner vapors in Leviathan,

Yet in my maturity I sent my kids to school in the same system, one sufficiently corrupted in the next few decades to the point wee they werenít even able to produce literacy in their tiny faithful. I even initiated a large program to reform the schools with some of the values I learnt myself not in a classroom but in rich skeins of years spent in the street, where some small truth was tolerably accessible.

Itís no wonder I foaled a bunch of expensive slaves. Freedom was good enough for me but not for them. Perhaps this essay is a small and ineffectual etude in expiation for my follies. Henry Adams says he felt he could have learnt more in six months in his fatherís library than he ever did at Harvard. If I had it to do all over again I would have never sent my kids to school nor gone to school myself.

In a way I donít feel all that mournful about the demise of our schools. Like Edsels and Yugos they were never much good in the first place. Thought one is better off as a quisling slave with a few bucks as one was educated to be in my time than a n illiterate dunce with no work ethic nor any discipline working in a supermarket for bupkis on Quaaludes, shaking to a beat from a hip-hop offering blasting into their head from hollow ear plugs, both the graduates of my and their time left our world of pedants on tenure and salary a long way from freedom.